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free download - University Press of Colorado

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Chapter Abstracts<br />

Chapter 1<br />

Hazards, Impacts, and Resilience among<br />

Hunter-Gatherers <strong>of</strong> the Kuril Islands<br />

Ben Fitzhugh<br />

<strong>University</strong> <strong>of</strong> Washington<br />

In the anthropological and archaeological literature, hunter-gatherers are <strong>of</strong>ten<br />

treated as victims <strong>of</strong> short-term environmental catastrophe and longer-term<br />

environmental change, responding to extreme environmental perturbations<br />

through adaptation or local extinction/emigration. The Kuril Biocomplexity<br />

Project was designed in part to evaluate the extent to which the hunter-gatherer<br />

settlement history in the environmentally dynamic Kuril Islands was<br />

affected by catastrophic events and sustained climate changes. This chapter<br />

pulls together newly generated archaeological, geological, and paleoenvironmental<br />

evidence to consider the extent to which Kuril hunter-gatherers were<br />

vulnerable to extreme environmental hazards in combination with relatively<br />

high geographic insularity.<br />

The chapter explicitly discusses the key hazards (volcanic eruptions, earthquakes<br />

and tsunamis, low biotic diversity, climate change, and their effects on<br />

sea ice distributions, storminess and marine productivity, and geographic-social<br />

insularity), evidence <strong>of</strong> past impacts (frequencies and intensities <strong>of</strong> volcanic<br />

xiii

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